Axel (6 page)

“I am not withdrawing the question.” And she was stalling rather than answer directly.

“I do not now,” she said, picking up another tea cake, “nor have I ever, had reason to stray, Mr. Belmont. What on earth would be the point?”

Not a clear no
, and since when did erotic pleasure require a
point
? Axel poured himself more tea to buy a moment to consider her prevarication. He’d lifted the silver teapot and served himself half a cup before he caught her watching him.

Helping himself
to a lady’s tea tray.

“I beg your pardon.” He sat back, chagrinned at this small, pathetic evidence of his widower status.

She didn’t smirk, she didn’t even smile. “Perhaps you’d top up my cup as well?”

He obliged, as a memory assailed him. He’d come upon Colonel Stoneleigh on a morning hack, hounds trotting at the horse’s heels, Ambers several respectful yards behind on a nervous hunter. By way of small talk, Axel had asked if Mrs. Stoneleigh enjoyed riding out, and the colonel’s ruddy face had wrinkled with distaste.

“She’s the delicate sort,” he’d said. “Easily overset, always flying into the boughs. A man wants to start his day with some peace and quiet. Can’t be cossetting the weaker sex at all hours, can we?”

Mrs. Belmont might be pale, but easily overset had been husbandly exaggeration from one who was himself given to tempers at the local pub and in the hunt field.

“Back to the topic, Mrs. Stoneleigh.” Axel set the teapot down, then realized he’d only bungled further. “Oh, very well.” He added milk and sugar to her cup, then passed it to her.

“Thank you, Mr. Belmont. I cannot recall when I last was served a cup of tea as I prefer it, but for your fussing on the day of the funeral. My husband was far too liberal with the sugar. You will have to call more often.”

Axel Belmont did not fuss, except when among his roses. Was she teasing him? Flirting? Or maybe—sad thought—realizing that life without a spouse could be grindingly lonely?

“About your lovers?” Axel prompted. “You may have none now, but I want you to keep a list of fellows who come calling, and the ones who seem particularly solicitous or curious about your finances.”

“Gregory has—had—an old friend several miles east of here.” She took a sip of her tea, closing her eyes for a moment as if inhaling fortitude along with the fragrance of a mild gunpowder. “Sir Dewey Fanning. They served together, and as you heard, Sir Dewey is the recipient of Gregory’s collection of hunting horns. He’ll likely come to call any day—hang protocol, for Sir Dewey is a bit of a mother hen—and several other old army chaps might come around as well. You don’t need to know about those fellows, do you?”

Half the regiment would soon be camping on her doorstep, Axel suspected, though where were
her
friends who’d
hang protocol
to be at her side?

“I do need to know about those fellows, Mrs. Stoneleigh, and why are you frowning?”

Worse than frowning, he’d caught her blinking at her tea cup in a manner that made a man eye the door and hope his handkerchief was clean. She set down her tea cup, rose, and went to the window.

“Would you frown, Mr. Belmont, were I to order you to name your potential intimates for my perusal, lest one of them be guilty of murdering your spouse?”

He would eject her from the premises. “Valid point, but my brother assures me that dalliance, while a predictable element of grief, is not usually suspicious. You want to take note of those fellows who are subtly beginning the courting dance.”

“I see.”

He approached her, wanting to
see
her eyes when the conversation turned difficult—also wanting to look her in the eye when he apologized.

“I have offended, and I regret that. Is this transgression greater than my usual lack of tact or delicacy?”

She stared out at the snowy landscape, though she likely did not see the gray stone walls marching over the bleak pastures and fields.

“I am… knocked off my pins, Mr. Belmont. I found myself thinking this morning that we hadn’t enough chairs in the formal parlor, because we’d need one for Gregory when the will was read. I expect Gregory to come in to breakfast, kiss my cheek, and tell me how his ride went while he fixes my first cup of tea with twice as much sugar as I prefer. I hear a door slam and think he’s back from the kennels… but he isn’t, and he never will be again.”

“You can’t prepare for those ambushes.” Nor could Axel have prepared for the urge to comfort this woman with an embrace. “Knocked off one’s pins is a good way to describe the ordeal you face.” Axel settled a hand on her arm, then moved back to the hearth, out of the range of hysterics and temper, both.

Though if ever a woman had justification for a bout of dramatics, Mrs. Stoneleigh did.

“The first year is the hardest,” he said. The second was hardest too, in a way, and the fifth as well. “The first spring, the first summer holiday, the first Christmas, the first time you observe all those small rituals alone that you used to observe together.”

Outside the cozy parlor, flurries danced down on the bitter wind. In deepest winter, Axel had gloried in the hours required in his glass houses, while Caroline had complained about having the boys constantly underfoot and her husband nowhere to be seen.

“You know you are making progress,” he said, “when you can recall the bad things honestly.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Telling her this was not disloyal, it was honest, and Abigail Stoneleigh deserved at least that. Axel had the sense that nobody else, not the widows in the churchyard, not Mrs. Weekes, not anybody, would explain this aspect of grieving to her.

“Six months after Caroline died, I admitted to myself while fishing with the boys, how blessedly quiet it was without their mother along. A fellow could hear himself think and catch some fish, though the very thought made me feel like a cad. I realized then that one day, one distant, unimaginable day, the grief would become manageable.”

Mostly.

Mrs. Stoneleigh resumed her seat, and Axel settled beside her, as much fortification as he could safely offer.

“When I am relieved not to have to smell Gregory’s blasted pipes, that is not a bad thing?”

Poor woman. The entire house still reeked of the colonel’s fondness for tobacco.

“It is not. Have a sandwich.” Axel chose one for her, and she took it without any fuss or posturing—a relief, that.

“I will have to think on this, though we are far, far from the topic of our murderer.”

Or her lovers.
“We are. Are you comfortable turning the colonel’s correspondence over to me, or shall I read it here?”

She made a face, probably finding the prospect of Axel running tame in her halls distasteful.

“Why not sort through it here and take with you what you want to read in detail?”

“That will suit, but as for the estate books, I’d best look at those on premises.”

Another grimace, this one around a bite of sandwich. “In some ways, Mr. Belmont, that is more presumptuous than asking about my personal life.”

Her love life, given how women typically viewed sexual intimacy. “If somebody has embezzled from your accounts, Mrs. Stoneleigh, then they had a motive to murder your husband.”

An uncomfortable thought intruded: They had a motive to murder Mrs. Stoneleigh now too, if she was about to discover the embezzlement.

“You are so sure you are correct about the means of death, Mr. Belmont, all you concern yourself with is the motive.”

Gregory Stoneleigh had not died of a heart seizure or an apoplexy while cleaning his weapon. He hadn’t had the grace to die of a plant-based poison either, which Axel was uniquely positioned to have detected.

“I saw your husband’s body, and yes, I am convinced he died of a gunshot wound to the chest. I had quite the frank talk on this very point with Gervaise Stoneleigh, and asked him to make inquiries regarding any suspicious aspects of the import business.”

“Gervaise will make those inquiries regardless. Thoroughness runs through his very veins.”

Axel’s impression of Gervaise Stoneleigh was one of brisk, unsentimental competence. The younger Stoneleigh wouldn’t leave to chance what diligence and effort could make certain.

A fine quality in a barrister—also in a murderer.

“Have you more questions, Mr. Belmont, or shall I show you to Gregory’s correspondence?”

“One more question.” Axel rose, and his hostess stood with him, which put them close enough he could see fine lines of fatigue fanning out from her eyes. She might have hidden them with cosmetics were she more sophisticated or less honest female.

She might also have emphasized her grief with cosmetics, but she had not.

“Ask, Mr. Belmont. I can’t imagine you’ve anything remaining your arsenal to shock me with.”

“Did Gregory have a mistress?”

Mr. Belmont was relentlessly inappropriate, but also fearless, and thus when
he
asked Abby the questions she’d been pushing aside since Gregory’s death, she came closer to answering them.

“I did say a woman’s hand can pull a trigger, did I not? But why would a mistress shoot her protector?” At least some of the sleep Abby had lost had been spent trying to come up with that answer.

“Because that protector was leaving her? Because he’d cast her aside for another, got her with child and denied his own progeny, given her diseases? Because he’d been unkind, or lost his temper and injured or disfigured her? A woman can have many reasons for hating a man with whom she’s been intimate.”

Blunt speech indeed, and yet, it proved Mr. Belmont had been thinking the case through, and that was reassuring.

“Hell hath no fury?” Abby recalled being furious, early in her marriage. Then she’d learned to keep busy and out of Gregory’s way. “You must also ask: Would I be so jealous as to put someone else up to killing Gregory if he disregarded his vows?”

A wife committed adultery, a man disregarded his vows. The law and society both considered it so, though most wives doubtless took a different view of the matter.

“You don’t strike me as a woman…”
Given to passion
. Apparently, even Axel Belmont would not put that sentiment into words. “As a woman given to violent impulses.”

Before her marriage, Abby had been very passionate. She’d argued politics with her grandfather, philosophy with her father, and the rights of women with her mother. She’d been infatuated with the son of another bookselling family and even had girlish designs on that fellow’s future. Her fondness for the fellow had blossomed in the midst of many heated debates over literary matters.

“I honestly don’t know if Gregory was unfaithful.” Abby hadn’t wanted to know. “He’d pop into Oxford every few weeks, and light-skirts abound there, for the university boys and the unmarried faculty, both. Gregory liked to go to Bath each quarter or so, and he and Sir Dewey went into London on occasion, or up north, shooting in the summer. They were always off on some lark. My husband and I were cordial, but… I don’t know how to answer you, Mr. Belmont.”

In too many instances, Abby simply did not know how to answer the magistrate’s questions, and that probably made her look like a very bad wife indeed.

Gregory might not argue with that characterization—he’d found much about her to criticize. The longer he was gone, the less Abby cared what her husband had thought of her, and the more she succumbed to the simple fear that whoever had killed Gregory might come for her next.

Mrs. Stoneleigh pulled open the desk drawers and produced two bags of tobacco, three pipes, and some pipe-cleaning supplies—all of which Axel had come across the night of the murder and replaced in the desk. Another drawer yielded bundles of correspondence.

Her hands were not quite steady as she passed him the letters.

He’d never enjoyed being magistrate, and he was coming to loathe the job now. “And the estate books?”

“I keep those in my office. Come along.”

They returned to her office, as she called it, where she crouched before the shelves beside her desk and heaved up a bound ledger from a lower shelf.

“I keep the books myself. You are welcome to look at the ledgers here, or take them with you.”

“I’ll start with the letters,” Axel said. “This would seem to be the most private place to work.” Also the most comfortable, and the only part of the house he’d seen so far that belonged to his hostess. The roses would like it here too, simply because the air did not reek of pipe smoke.

“You’ll not be disturbed. Make yourself at home, and I’ve wanted to ask, when will you take possession of your mares?”

His… mares. Stoneleigh had bequeathed him a damned pair of yearling mares.

“I’d honestly forgotten them. I can fetch them early next week.” An idea popped into Axel’s head, one having to do with Mrs. Stoneleigh’s pallor, the passing tremor in her hands, and too many years of not being a very good neighbor to her. “Would you be willing to accompany me on such an errand?”

She lifted the vase and sniffed at the roses, the gesture artlessly lovely.

“Isn’t that a little like going riding with you, Mr. Belmont? I am in first mourning and barely allowed to set foot out of the house for the next two months or so, save to go to services or see family and very close friends.”

Or to humor a magistrate whose investigation had brought no answers thus far?

Axel liked his idea the longer he thought about it, and he did not like the idea of her becoming a prisoner in this house on behalf of a husband who’d regarded a lady’s maid as an extravagance.

“And what a pleasure that will be,” Axel said, “to sit alone and watch the snow fall, then melt, then fall again. We’ll merely walk the mares from your stable to mine, and we can accomplish this without even using a proper road if you’re concerned about public opinion. I hardly think seeing the colonel’s bequest executed constitutes gross disrespect for the dead.”

“I suppose not.”

Axel didn’t press for a definite yes, having learned a few things in the years of his marriage.